Community listening

2026: Community listening and environmental equity in Evanston

Jeff Merrell

24 Mar 2026 — 29 min read

Note: This is a long post - much longer than I usually write. But it lays out the full current state of the work I am doing, and how I think about community listening, co-creating local solutions, and learning what those activities mean for environmental equity in my home city. You can also read a shorter version of this post that focuses just on ideas about designing community listening and co-creation practices.

The backstory

In 2025 I began an effort to discover how to contribute to improving community listening in my local community - Evanston, Illinois. It led to starting work in one specific area: Environmental justice and equity.

To be clear: I am an absolute novice in both community listening and environmental equity. But what I know is that you develop expertise by doing, by engaging in the actual practice of something, learning from it, and (for me) writing and thinking-out-loud about it.

I was also curious to explore whether folks like me, whose professional background integrates learning, knowledge-sharing, design, and change, might offer something in service of addressing this co-creation challenge. Not to replace or reconfigure existing know-how. But to activate it more effectively.

So here we are.

After a year of working with folks who know more than me, and experiencing how community listening happens in practice in my community, it appears that the challenges persist. Not only working on the craft of better listening, but also moving from listening to co-creating effective civic solutions with community members.

Author and consultant Peter Block describes the co-creation challenge as ingrained through two competing perspectives. The business perspective positions citizens as consumers of local government services; we demand better service from a local government which holds the power and purse. The contrast is a common-good perspective; we citizens have the cooperative capacity to collaboratively produce our own well-being.

Block's work builds off of asset-based community development, a way of addressing how citizens move in power from being recipients to being more in control of developing solutions to local issues. It also resonates with the design with, not for mindset of design justice, which explores how to center power and agency in the community of folks who are impacted by solutions more typically designed by "experts."

In practice this challenge of co-creating effective civic solutions is not either/or: Either our civic institutions create solutions or citizens do. It is a both/and dance. The fact that the challenge remains, well, challenging, says more about the nature of the both/and dance than the quantity or quality of approaches. Community listening and co-creation are complex and nuanced. How it plays out is forever changing based on the specifics of the issue, the locale, and the moment in time.

This post takes a next step: Organizing a year of volunteer work and thinking-out-loud into a way to frame the challenges I continue to explore. Specifically in Evanston, specifically about environmental equity.

That context of locale and issue is not just important. It is everything. It is a keen lesson I’ve learned in my years of work as an educator. What works or doesn’t work is deeply tied to the moment in time, the people involved, and the topic.

The 2026 setting: Environmental equity in Evanston

On Jan. 12, 2026, the Evanston City Council voted unanimously to accept the final report of the Evanston Environmental Equity Investigation (EEI).

The report was the culmination of a year-long project in 2025 to document historical and current environmental injustices and inequities across Evanston neighborhoods. But the reports roots go back to advocacy work in the 2010s. Its deepest roots take us back to early 1900s Evanston.

Evanston is an urban suburb bordering Chicago. Its long eastern border is Lake Michigan. Land along the lakefront has long been prime real estate. Charles Dawes (U.S. Vice President under Calvin Coolidge) and Daniel Burnham (legendary Chicago architect) had homes there. Northwestern University sits on the lakefront at the northern edge of the city. Travel further north past the Evanston border, along the lake, and you find some of the wealthiest communities in the U.S. At that northern end of Evanston, from the lake to the city’s northwest corner, you find elegant single-family homes on spacious lots, a kind of transition toward the wealthy northern suburbs.

Today that northern section and much of the lakefront residential area is predominantly white. This is not by accident. Black residents started living in Evanston in the 1850s and grew to live throughout the city by the turn of the century. But in the early 1900s, real estate practices restricted Black community members from owning homes in the most desirable neighborhoods. Redlining and restrictive covenants hardened that process in the 1930s and beyond.

Black folks were steered to the west side - away from the lake, bordering the railroad tracks, in a neighborhood also zoned for light industry. The south and southwest side of the city - bordering Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood - likewise developed into a more diverse community with Black and Brown residents and a greater concentration of multi-unit buildings and modest single-family homes.

So we start with two largely segregated communities formed by discriminatory real estate practices and through even more insidious zoning policy. These neighborhoods are where we see the cumulative impact of elements that lead to environmental injustices.

The current 2026 environmental equity setting - with the completion of the EEI report - grew out of advocacy in the 2010s to draw attention to a waste transfer station, an operation where garbage trucks dump their loads for consolidation before it moves to landfills.

Evanston’s waste transfer station (“It’s really a garbage dump,” says one equity leader) sits in a residential neighborhood on the city’s predominantly Black west side. It exists today in violation of the state’s current location standards for such operations - designed to protect residential neighborhoods from air quality, pest and noise impacts - only due to a state government exception, granted in part because the operation existed in that location for 40+ years. And facilitated by the fact that it is operated by a corporate entity with deep pockets.

Two leaders behind the original waste transfer station advocacy effort - Janet Alexander Davis and Jerri Garl - became (and remain) central to the next stages of environmental equity work.

Alexander Davis and Garl are co-leaders of Environmental Justice Evanston, first established in 2014 as a subcommittee of the city’s Environment Board, later transitioning to become a program under the not-for-profit Climate Action Evanston. Their work over the next years helped set policy and action in the city to ensure that something like the waste transfer station might never happen again.

That work included the city passing an Environmental Justice Resolution in 2020. The resolution explicitly acknowledges the city’s role in historical injustices, and outlined actions the city should take in the future (not all of which are fulfilled).

But it also set a definition of environmental justice which continues to influence Evanston advocacy and policy. Environmental justice is:

When every community member experiences the same degree of access to environmental assets, protection from environmental hazards and health risks, and an opportunity to play an effective role in making decisions that affect the quality of life in Evanston.

Another pivotal moment came in 2022 with the publication of the EPLAN - a research effort conducted by the city’s Health and Human Services Department. Though not explicitly an environmental research project, the report established a key data point that linked the cumulative impacts of neighborhood environments to health. The data point: Residents in the city’s west side neighborhood have a life expectancy 13 years less than residents in the wealthier, whiter neighborhoods.

That life expectancy fact - and the recognition of cumulative environmental impacts affecting life expectancy and quality - became central to the work of the team behind the EEI project in 2025.

The project unfolded throughout that year, encompassing several open community engagement workshops; focus groups with community leaders; technical workgroup meetings with city staff; surveys and pop-up events; and analysis of existing relevant city data.

The team documented disparities across several areas: open spaces, parks and trees; streets and transportation (including air quality); housing; and community services (waste management, flooding, etc.). Disparities were clearly linked to historical policy decisions that led to inequitable conditions. Action plans for each area outlines potential paths for remedying the disparities and preventing them in the future.

All of this was contained in the final report adopted by the City Council on Jan. 12, 2026.

Note: In this post, I will use environmental equity, rather than environmental justice, to describe the work. It could be either, but the choice is a nod to two principal leaders of the Evanston environmental justice movement who intentionally used equity in leading the effort with the city to commit to the EEI.

The three elements of community listening

In 2025 I had the opportunity to attend and observe three of four open public workshops designed to gather community experiences, knowledge and input for the EEI project. I also began to attend and observe similar city events designed to engage community members on topics that can be seen through the lens of environmental equity.

As a new member of Environmental Justice Evanston (EJE) - co-led by Jerri Garl and Janet-Alexander Davis - and the newly formed Evanston Environmental Justice Coalition, I also had the opportunity to learn how equity leaders think about community listening and co-creation, and the challenges they face in making improvements to those practices.

All of this led me to try to answer the question: What do I mean by "community listening?"

I came to define it as consisting of three elements:

How a group facilitates listening to the community members it serves.
How a group helps community members make sense of what it is learning.
How a group facilitates co-creating solutions with the community members it serves.

The three are not linear; each informs the other. And listening - in particular - is present throughout.

These elements are aspirational for me, as I continue to explore this work. Am I holding myself accountable for continuing to focus on ways to facilitate true community co-creation, based on these three elements?

The remainder of this post is organized around exploring that aspiration.

First, I look at general principles that guide how I think about the practice of community listening and co-creation. I then look more deeply at each of the three elements - listening, making sense and co-creation - and where my initial experiences have identified potential opportunities for improvement.

General design principles

A few general design principles guide my thinking about the practice of community listening and co-creation. More may emerge through experience. These are the principles as they stand at this moment.

Design with, not for

Design with, not for requires letting go of the "expert designer" power dynamic. The desire is to build cooperative capacity; neighbors working together to solve neighborhood challenges by designing their own solutions.

Neighbors - like any group or team - will hit limits in their capacity and require resources or expertise they may not have. When they do, the power should be in the hands of the neighborhood collective to invite in the resources or expertise they require. Flip the power dynamic. We (the experts) are not here to tell you how you might address your challenge. We must be invited in, and then act in your service.

Interwoven elements

The three elements - listening, making sense and co-creating - are deeply interwoven. When you co-create, for example, you are making sense. You may also be listening and discovering something new.

The distinction between the three is in the primary outcome.

Listening is: Do we surface and understand individual lived experience about some specific challenge?

Making sense is: Can we take multiple stories of lived experience and define what they mean? As a collective, can we synthesize stories and other data into some pattern or theme? This may be temporary consensus and change routinely. But the key is a group of people agree on some meaning.

Co-creating is: Based on what we hypothesize as meaning, can the collective design a solution to the challenge? Designing a solution may take multiple iterations. We design, test, gather feedback and adjust. But the end outcome is a solution designed by the collective.

Design to the type of thinking task(s) you require of participants.

This criteria became apparent to me after several experiences witnessing the same failure of choice.

Organizers of listening events may default to a routine (i.e., listening session = town hall) or they use a meeting structure that is prioritized to gather data or ideas in support of a specific need (i.e., consultants or planners using dot voting to prioritize issues, or having participants review work-in-progress on community issues).

Neither is inherently bad. But they are a choice - a design choice. What I am suggesting is that we need to overlay these choices with another question that focuses attention on the participant experience rather than the organizer's information sharing or data gathering needs.

What types of thinking tasks may we desire participants to perform?

Tap into their memories and share actual lived experiences
Make a decision
Brainstorm solution ideas (individually or with others)
Co-create solution ideas with other participants
Build consensus
All or some mix of the above

Being explicit about these thinking tasks - and using them to help plan participant experience - is important for a couple of reasons.

It forces us to think about the cognitive effort folks must put into whatever activities we plan. Some tasks take more thinking effort than others. Building small group consensus or co-creating solution ideas are more challenging than recounting routine lived experiences. Dot voting to make a decision can be simple or complex, depending on the voting setup. Being aware of effort helps us design to adapt to the effort required or to reduce unnecessary effort.

Being explicit about thinking tasks also helps us design strategies to model and reinforce the kind of thinking engagement we desire.

In one listening event I attended, participants were divided into small table groups to review and discuss a set of specific, local environmental justice issues organized by themes (transportation, housing, open space, community services). A facilitator gave a clear description about the activity to participants before they broke off to assigned table groups. However, an assumption is made here that telling folks about the activity is enough to get set off in the right direction.

That's a dangerous assumption. People come with agendas and strong opinions and may hijack the activity. Folks may misinterpret or mishear the facilitator's instructions. They may be unfamiliar with the type of activity you ask them to engage in, or lack confidence in their ability to participate effectively.

You can design strategies to mitigate these challenges. But you need to make the choice to do so.

We really need to pause and ask ourselves: In order to get what we need, how do we best prepare folks for the kind of thinking required? Otherwise we get unanchored opinions or answers without tapping into participant insight.

Ensure real lived experience - not conjecture - informs dialogue or decision making

One of my favorite structures for group collaboration is What, So What, Now What? (from Liberating Structures). It moves a group toward thinking about new possibilities but only after first understanding what actually happened and then unpacking what that experience may mean.

You get more reliable information when you ask about specific, real experiences rather than asking "how do you typically...?" or "how often do you...?" "Tell me about what you had for dinners this week?" is better than "Tell me what you typically eat for dinner?"

Focusing on stories or moments of real lived experience offers a few benefits.

It leads folks away from sharing ungrounded opinions.
It emphasizes what people actually do vs. what they think they do.
It offers up stories that provide rich and subtle insights into how folks deal with situations and make decisions.

A community listening event should always lean into the opportunity to collect stories of real lived experiences, in some form or another. It's why folks come to a listening event; with the hope that their lived lived experience will make a difference.

And we must remember that lived experience continuously changes over time. What we heard last year (or even last month) may not be the same as the current state of the community. Listening deeply helps us pick up the signals of changing circumstances.

Designing to ensure that lived experience informs dialogue or decision making means paying attention to the prompts we use to initiate engagement. The What, So What, Now What? format begins with "What happened?" "What did you notice?" The focus is on facts and observations.

Prompts can also focus on telling stories or describing moments of time:

Can you think of an example from your own experience?
Tell me about a time when you experienced ...

The key point is: Think about the points in your listening session where it is important to focus participants first on real lived experiences. Then build off of those experiences to more complex thinking (i.e., making decisions, finding consensus, brainstorming ideas, etc.)

If we miss this opportunity at the early stages of exploring an issue, we end up making downstream decisions - things that lead to solution development - on a foundation of opinions and conjecture rather than actual lived experiences.

Design for > 90% active participation

How does the event give voice to every participant? And preferably, make that voice visible to both organizers and other participants?

This might really be "design for 100% active participation." But I am accounting for some event formats - like town halls with civic leaders, or panel discussions - where participants may attend because they sincerely just want to listen, learn and/or judge.

Even in these cases, however, we should design opportunities to tap into the thinking of those who make the effort to join the event. An audience passively listening is still an audience thinking and making connections to their own experiences. We should find ways to make that thinking visible.

I attended one town hall on transportation issues. It drew more than 100 participants. For participation, the organizers relied on an open-mic Q&A segment. That gave voice to about 8 people.

What were the other 92+ thinking? We'll never know.

Again, this is an example of design choices. We choose to follow the standard script of a town hall. Why?

Why not reward those 92 folks who made the effort to attend - but did not speak - by including some small designed activity to capture their stories or thinking? The toolkit of potential activities is big. We should choose to explore that toolbox and experiment with small ways to ensure we give voice to every participant.

Actively reinforce the values of civic participation

Why do people attend community input events or activities?

I would love to explore this more explicitly with participants: "Tell me about when you decided to attend this session. What happened?" My assumption is folks are drawn by a deep interest in the topic of an event (i.e., climate change/environment, transportation, education, etc) or they have a complaint or challenge they want leaders to hear (during, say, a meeting held by local politicians).

They may also see it as a way of contributing to a particular cause that cuts across local, regional and global settings (climate change is a good example). Or making visible their commitment to the community and their neighbors.

These are all good reasons.

The experience I have had at attending events, however, was transactional. Come to the meeting, engage, and...thank you. No effort was made to connect our engagement to a larger set of values, or how our participation is evidence of our understanding what it means to be an informed citizenry. In the events I attended, participants literally just walked away when done.

In other settings I have experienced an effort to make a connection to a larger set of values. I have heard judges eloquently reinforce the value of "a jury of one's peers" during jury selection proceedings. When we vote, we reach for the "I voted" stickers and wear them to signal that we have completed our duty.

If we really value the fact that folks take time away from their families, their routines, and the challenges of everyday life to engage in the work of sharing their thinking about the community, then let's recognize this as a core foundation of our democratic system of governing.

The following posts are the sources for specific stories and my thinking:

How a group facilitates listening to the community members it serves

The outcome of listening is to surface and understand individual lived experience about some specific challenge.

We're not interested in solution ideas at this point. We're not interested in opinions or conjecture about "the problem." The other elements - making sense and co-creating - will help us define the problems to solve and then design potential solutions.

Listening is about discovering the messy, human details of experience. What is the specific situation and what do people actually do?

In doing so, the assumption is we begin to build a foundation to better co-design solutions that actually improve quality of life.

Several insights about improving the design of community listening in this context emerge from my 2025 observations:

The opportunity of continuous listening
The need to think about the thinking tasks
Making stories a base unit of listening

Listening events and continuous listening

I am indebted here to the work of Teresa Torres, with whom I co-taught for seven years. The work we did with organizational change leaders built off of Teresa’s work in the digital product world and her book Continuous Discovery Habits. Her book and continuous discovery practices are changing the way product teams around the world do their work.

A central insight in Torres’ work is that discovery - listening - historically happens within project cycles. We have a project with a start and end time. We listen during that cycle, the listening feeds a phase where designers do design, and we end the project with some new designed solution or feature.

It is useful to think about projects more generally as “events.” An event is organized and has a clear start and end time. Meetings are events. Week-long “design sprints” are events. Projects are a longer form of event.

Torres argued that digital product development teams would benefit from continuous discovery - continuously interviewing customers every week. This does not negate listening as part of events (projects, meetings, etc.). It adds a foundation with several benefits. Among them, product teams build listening muscle by doing listening continuously. And you begin to address the challenge of understanding folks’ experience in an ever-changing world by never pausing your monitoring.

What might continuous listening look like in the civic world? And what might it change?

You start to see the cyclical nature of listening in community and civic contexts.

The Evanston Environmental Equity Investigation (EEI) is a classic example. It was a year-long project and included a mix of defined events (focus groups, large-group workshops, pop-up events). At the end of the year, all that listening was synthesized into a report with solution recommendations.

And the energetic listening stopped.

EEI was a very good project and its outcomes may be game-changing. But still. It operated on a cycle. We listen during the cycle. Then we stop.

Other Evanston civic projects operate on the same model. The community input into Evanston’s 25-year strategic plan was designed as a project consisting of many listening events. A report was issued and the listening stopped.

In addition to large projects like EEI and the 25-year plan, public engagement efforts across city departments typically rely on scheduling meetings to gather community feedback. (They may also include surveys - another tool that can be improved with a continuous mindset).

So we think about community listening as happening in cycles, or through events.

What might a continuous listening approach look like in the environmental equity effort, and what would it change?

First, it forces you to imagine how to break free of the cyclical habit. It’s not a project. It’s infrastructure, or a utility like electricity service.

It also forces you to think about creating tiny events or moments. To do something continuously means it must be a quick and easy routine. In the product world this means short, weekly interviews with customers.

Weekly is likely too big a leap for the civic world (but what if?). But thinking about how to create tiny events or moments may help address one of the biggest challenges of community listening: Getting to people who have insight but not the capacity to attend typical community listening events.

We often talk about “meeting folks where they are” in community listening. But what if where they are is at the laundromat at 8 pm, squeezing chores into their long days? Tiny events may help.

Finally, continuous listening also forces you to think about integrating insights or listening needs across areas of interest.

Climate Action Evanston is a not-for-profit organization with six distinct program areas, including Environmental Justice Evanston. Imagine that each group embraced continuous listening. At some point, each program will try to engage those hard-to-reach community members, living in the same neighborhoods, with similar demographics and life experiences.

Rather than working in silos, a group like Climate Action Evanston might think strategically about how to best leverage those precious moments of listening time and build shared insights about folks’ lived experiences.

That same silo-breaking dynamic would play out across departments within the city of Evanston. Insights from citizens might influence multiple departments: parks, health, public works, etc.

You might even extend that silo-breaking and think about cross-organizational insights: Climate Action Evanston, the city, other organizations sharing insights with each other.

Projects such as EEI, regularly scheduled community meetings, design reviews of city plans or similar events should still play an important role in community listening. An additional layer of continuous listening activity might offer more opportunity to build insight, reach more community members, and facilitate silo-breaking habits.

Think about the thinking tasks

Two stories illustrate how not thinking about thinking tasks impact the desired outcome of surfacing actual lived experience.

In both cases, an opportunity was missed to help participants understand why giving specific examples of real lived experiences is important (more informed decisions). In one case the exact opposite - hurling opinions and grievances - was set in motion to start a meeting. Both cases also missed opportunities to nudge experience-sharing in small group activities.

The first case was a community input meeting to help the city create a new 20-year comprehensive plan, intended to shape a clear vision and policy priorities for housing, transportation, heath, climate/environment, arts, business development, and more.

It was early on in the project, one of a number of similar meetings held across the city designed more for gathering information and experiences than providing feedback on ideas. The one I attended was at a local school in the part of the city where I live. It was in the evening in the school auditorium.

The 40+ attendees started out sitting at long tables, organized in rows, facing one direction. I didn't know anyone there and said a soft hello to my table neighbor. I could see several folks came in pairs or groups. To one side and behind the tables was a set of five or six poster boards, arranged so each was out in more open space.

The purpose of these became evident soon; they were designed to get folks to think openly and constructively, in small groups, about what contributes to positive experiences in a local place.

A facilitator opened with a short overview of the process and what a comprehensive plan is. They noted that Evanston had not updated its zoning code and comprehensive plan since the mid-1990s and a lot has changed since then.

Then they asked the attendees something like "Think back to the 1990s and Evanston. What's changed for you since then?" The question was open to anyone who wanted to answer. These are the answers they got:

"Property taxes were a lower then. They are too high now."
"There are too many tall buildings downtown."
"A lot more homeless people now."

All were subjective and negative and shared by those folks who felt comfortable airing grievances in front of a large group. It did not fit the desired experience of the design: To have folks share with each other, in small groups, about things that might contribute to a healthy, enjoyable community.

The second example followed a similar pattern, but also demonstrates how subtle changes in the design of small group moments might improve participant decision making. It is also an example of where listening (sharing lived experiences) and sense-making (what do we mean by that?) come together.

In this case, the community meeting was to gather additional early input on environmental equity themes emerging from the Evanston Environmental Equity Investigation effort. Initial themes were organized under general categories - open spaces, streets and transportation, housing, city services - and displayed on poster boards.

A theme was described in 1-2 short sentences. The intention was to validate and prioritize draft themes within each category through small-group discussion and dot voting.

A challenge with dot voting: If you ask someone to use three sticky dots to vote for their top three priority items they will follow the assignment. But how are they making their decision? Is it based on gut-feel opinion or actual personal experience? What comes into their mind when they read the theme description? Are they making a generally accurate interpretation? Are they drawing the same meaning as others in the group?

A design improvement to mitigate this thinking-transparency challenge is to think about splitting each small group session into two parts. First build a foundation of shared experiences within the group about the themes. Then - and only then - move to voting.

Some of the small group facilitators were experienced enough to nudge each group along this path. Others were less successful. But I know (because I asked) that this two-part split was not an explicit element of their design. Making it explicit through design elements and facilitator preparation might improve results. As well, participants would experience a similar look-and-feel across poster-board sessions and develop a better sense of how best to participate.

Make stories a basic unit of listening

Almost all that you might want to know about how folks experience a challenge - more than folks often think - can be revealed through stories. And it's better data because stories are anchored in what people actually do rather than what they say they typically do.

In my years of teaching with Teresa Torres, one of the more fascinating aha moments to watch came when students discovered these insights.

Imagine you want to know how people plan (or not) for grocery shopping. You might want to know:

When and how often they go
If they use a written grocery list
If the grocery list supports planned meals (recipes)
Under what circumstances do they just wing it

The standard approach is to turn these into questions. When do you go grocery shopping? Do you use a grocery list when shopping? Do you plan meals in advance and shop to get the ingredients?

Teresa’s work advocates for a different approach. Think of those questions as research questions. You don’t ask those directly. Instead, you create a question designed to elicit a story which will reveal the answers to those questions.

Tell me about it the last time you went grocery shopping.

When students worked on using this approach in real settings, there were two big aha’s.

They got answers to their research questions without asking the research question directly.
The story details yielded important context and nuance that would not have been revealed otherwise. It revealed the messiness of life, how we all navigate it, and how little things may be more than little things.

This is not to say that we should stop asking direct research questions or using other methods to gather data. What it means is that stories get at the richness of lived experience when revealing answers to our questions. And they are easy to integrate into any listening setting.

Can you give me an example of that? Tell me what happened.
Have you ever done that or something similar? Tell me what happened.
Tell me about a time when…

Recently some volunteer colleagues and I had scheduled a series of informal conversations with folks to understand more clearly their motivations and interests around environmental justice, and what kinds of things help to engage them more actively in different volunteer efforts.

One person said it helps to have specific actions to get engaged. We asked: Can you give me an example of that? Tell me what happened. And then we probed to understand the story.

What was revealed is that doing actions with other people is valued as a way to build relationships and is especially important if you are more introverted. Activities give folks a common denominator upon which to talk with each other. And we gained a specific story which brings that insight to life.

Treating stories as a kind of basic unit of listening opens the door to many approaches to collecting stories, and tunes you to continuously probe for context to better understand “lived experiences” in more messy, human detail. Stories can be collected in very formal, structured interviews. Or you can just say “Can you give me a specific example of that? Set the scene for me.” The latter allows you to probe for stories during any time you have a conversation with folks.

We should aim for a rich mix of methods and approaches to collect insights. But stories do lend themselves to easy integration into multiple points of contact with folks. And that flexibility is valuable.

The following posts are the sources for specific stories and my thinking:

How a group helps community members make sense of what it is learning

The outcome of making sense is: Can we take multiple stories of lived experience and define what they mean? As a collective, can we synthesize stories and other data into some pattern or theme?

This may be temporary consensus and change often. But the key is a group of people agree on some meaning.

In my 2025 experience with environmental equity, this translated into a few specific activities.

Giving feedback on ideas
Identifying priorities (what things are important to you, and why?)
Identifying gaps in thinking (what are we missing here?)

The first two are a bit further down the path of making sense. Consultants and/or city staff answered the key making-sense question - we have this data, what does it mean? - then translated it into something to share with community members. That's different than community members taking the first step. But it does get close. Community members need to think and make sense of what they are hearing or seeing from the consultant. That's still difficult thinking work.

The third - identifying gaps - gets a little closer to community members engaging in making sense. To identify gaps, you need to understand and make sense of the data you are shown.

This leads to two insights on improving the design of making sense as part of community listening:

Once again, thinking about the thinking tasks
Understanding the role of things we create to make sense

Thinking about thinking tasks

Another story illustrates faulty assumptions we make when we do not think about the thinking tasks. This becomes even more important when we ask folks to engage in making sense and co-creating. Both take a lot of thinking power.

The story involves another open meeting designed for community members to give feedback on ideas that were part of a year-long research effort on environmental equity.

The main activity involved having participants rotate through four sets of poster boards, organized by the priority areas of environmental equity work that had emerged during the project: Housing, City Services, Open Spaces and Transportation.

Each poster listed 10-12 draft programs or policies that could be recommended to the city. Participants were asked to put sticky dots on ideas that they perceived as high priority and use post-it notes to add anything that might be missing.

Here are three examples of ideas listed on different poster boards:

Align environmental sustainability efforts with local workforce development to encourage people to enter 'green' careers.
Establish environmental justice “green zones” to for investment (the zones would be historically disadvantaged neighborhoods).
Establish a licensing policy for landlords.

Keep in mind the setup and the task. Each of these individual ideas sits as part of a list of 10-12 other ideas and you are asked - in minutes - to assess which should be high priority. You can ask questions of a facilitator stationed at each poster board.

The problem: Most all of the policy and program ideas were very complex, but were only described in 1-2 sentences. This approach assumes people can imagine how these policies and programs might actually work. That they can connect the dots between "if this were in place, then it would do this for me." That’s a huge leap.

I can imagine all sorts of stuff about green workforce development programs, or green zones or landlord licensing. But I know I'm also making a lot of assumptions about what those programs might actually do and how it might address my needs or desires. And my needs or desires are not the same as others.

What the facilitators got were people doing what people do: Ask them to decide on something they will give you an answer. But unless they were policy experts, most of the answers will be uninformed. And even policy experts would be making assumptions about what the policy description actually means.

A design improvement would be to think about ways to engage folks more thoughtfully in far fewer ideas. For facilitators this may mean doing the hard work of making choices to reduce the number of ideas. A filter might be: Which of the ideas might benefit most from community member insights? Or what aspect of the idea might benefit most from community member insights?

For example: Green zones is a big, complex idea. It requires governance, funding models, decisions about scale and scope, and likely a number of new ways of operating for the city. Imagining how all of that comes to life is the work of city staff, political leaders and perhaps some community leaders knowledgable about similar efforts.

Community members who live in prospective "green zones" do have something valuable to contribute to the idea: Their experiences and insights from other similar investment or grant-giving programs targeting their communities. A number of these programs exist, or have existed in the recent past.

Learning about the actual experiences of folks who participated in these programs, benefited from them or even resisted them might provide critical design considerations for green zone effort.

The role of things we create to make sense

"Artifacts without participation do not carry their own meaning; and participation without artifacts is fleeting, unanchored, and uncoordinated." - Etienne Wenger

Wenger is an educational theorist, author and practitioner whose work led to the concept of communities of practice. Communities of practice describe a collective of folks - organized intentionally or occurring organically - who come together to learn how to do and improve some field or practice of work.

Artifacts are things we humans create. And in the quote above, they are the things we create to make meaning.

I used this quote often in my teaching because it gets to two very keen insights.

When a group of people are exploring a challenge or topic, we need to create something - a document, a sketch, a presentation - to help the group converge on what their exploration might mean.

But importantly - what we create does not carry its own meaning. Folks who did not participate in creating that thing do not understand it in the same way as the folks who did participate in its creation.

The story outlined above in "Thinking about thinking tasks" is a perfect example.

The poster boards detailing a lists of ideas hold a lot more meaning to the consultants who created them. They thought deeply about themes they heard from other community listening sessions, combined that with their knowledge of potential policies and practices, and tried to craft something which fit the local sensibilities and concerns of Evanston communities. That's hard, long thinking work.

Community participants attending the session which used the poster boards for discussion had to create their own meaning about the ideas. The ideas "do not carry their own meaning."

The design insight we should take away from this: Hold as the highest standard a process which engages community members themselves in exploring their own experiences, converging on what it might mean by creating something together, and then doing something with that finding (co-creation). This is exactly what the What, So What, Now What? group facilitation structure does, for example.

If we, as outsiders, create something that synthesizes experiences or data, and it is being shared with folks who had no role participating in that synthesis, then we need to find ways to give more time and space for folks to make their own sense of what we've created.

The following posts are the sources for specific stories and my thinking:

How a group facilitates co-creating solutions with the community members it serves

The outcome of co-creation is a solution to address a challenge designed by a collective of community members.

Co-creation (or co-design) is really hard. No examples exist in my experience in environmental equity. In that experience , community collaboration = the community gives input and feedback on someone else's solutions.

So we still need to explore: How do we use the resources we have to share power with community members in designing solutions and distributing its benefits?

If we've done the good work of community listening, and then synthesize what we've heard so that the community can make its own meaning, we've at least got a solid foundation of understanding, and perhaps we've built some collaboration muscle among community members.

Two factors appear to be important:

Growing community/neighborhood collaboration structures
Experimenting with design process

Growing community/neighborhood collaboration structures

Imagine there were a neighborhood block club. It meets routinely. Folks work together on neighborhood get-togethers and sometimes on issues affecting neighborhood health. It is informal, but has structure.

It's an ideal host for co-design work.

But the reality is we live in a current world more affected by the laundromat problem. As facilitators and advocates we want to meet folks "where they are." But what if where they are is at the laundromat at 8 pm, squeezing chores into their long days? Block clubs may exist in some neighborhoods but the current landscape suggests that energy goes elsewhere.

This is a difficult challenge. But my experience over the past year does show some positive deviance - neighborhoods facing all the current challenges of today's environment but still collaborating as neighbors, working toward a healthy community.

A neighborhood email list for informal communications turned into a resource to monitor and track a nearby business that was releasing pollutants. That effort led to advocacy, inspections and an eventual change in the business's operations.

The city runs a Love Your Block program which provides small grants to neighborhoods to support very local improvements. Neighbors got together, envisioned ideas, and executed them with the funding. Several 2025 projects fall into a broad view of environmental equity.

Outside of environmental equity issues, there are also mutual aid groups. And recently, the incredible informal organization of folks working to protect their neighbors from ICE.

What this suggests to me is there are existing structures and types of structures that have the potential to come to life even given the current conditions. An area of discovery might be to explore this existing opportunity and understand more about growing community/neighborhood collaboration structures.

Experimenting with design process

Co-designing solutions will test any group's ability to collaborate. Going from divergent thinking (listening and exploring) to converging and consensus creates tension.

In my teaching experience - when we had working professionals moving from divergent thinking to converging on potential solutions - process and humility were key to ensuring that the tension is of a productive sort, helping co-designers stay sharp in their thinking as they converge on potential solutions.

This is something I first explored in Community listening and co-creation, after a conversation with my friend and former colleague Nicole Dessain. Folks need a process - a clear set of tools and activities - to help them work through the tension of making decisions required to land on a potential solution design.

Humility comes into play when you legitimately hold onto the thought that, no matter how good is your process, you're going to get some things wrong. It's a weird dynamic: Be decisive and move forward with confidence, but be humble enough to recognize your own fallibility.

"Trust the process" is a phrase we used when teaching how to design solutions that work in complex settings, such as organizations. But we also did not want folks to follow process steps for the goal of learning how to faithfully execute those steps in some robotic manner.

The point was to learn, through doing, how to make the process steps their own. To understand what works in their particular workplace setting, what doesn't, why that might be, and then adjust and tweak the process to help achieve desired outcomes. To recognize that process and practices are mechanisms for learning.

Which is how I get to experimenting with co-design process in the neighborhood setting. In Evanston neighborhood settings, to be even more specific. How might we work to discover co-design process and practice which fits that setting?

The following posts are the sources for specific stories and my thinking:

The photographs which accompany these posts are taken by me, and show different settings and views of Evanston (where I live). It is a visual reminder that this is the most important setting for belonging and contributing to community: our neighborhoods, our cities.

2026: Community listening and environmental equity in Evanston

Jeff Merrell

The backstory

The 2026 setting: Environmental equity in Evanston

The three elements of community listening